Archive for the ‘Contentment’ Category

There are a number of different trees growing up on the Holley property.

Wolf plans to thin out a bunch of the pines near the house area, since they are the favored habitat of ticks and other nasty critters.

There are also plenty of hardwoods around, so things will still be plentifully forested.

But I also want to plant some food trees.

We’re planning to buy the biggest ones we can manage (financially and logistically), since we hope to not have to wait ten years for a mature, fruit-bearing tree. And we are hoping to start planting now, so that they have these couple of years before we move up there.

So, what would the ideal small homestead “tree farm” contain?

Here’s what we’ve been thinking:

• Apples. Good for eating straight, applesauce, cider, etc., etc.
• Sugar Maple. Syrup and sugar – the old-fashioned way.
• Pecan. Nuts are a good food. Pecan is not necessarily our very favorite, but I know it grows well in the climate there.

I also want to plant a couple of non-fruit-bearing pear trees, which has the most beautiful, sudden bursting into flower in the springtime, and allowed me to fall in love with Mississippi.

So, how many of each kind of tree? Just one, because how much can we eat? Two, for pollination, and you can sell surpluses? Three, because you want two and that way there’s a spare?

And what other food trees should we consider?

Now begins the quest for a simpler life.

My wife and I have been wanting a simpler lifestyle more and more over the past few years. We are both used to the big cities of California.

She has come to long for a simpler life for us and our children. I was born and reared in northeast Mississippi and hunted and fished and heard stories of farming and having animals.

We felt that if we could ever buy a decent-sized plot of land with running water it would be a dream come true.

I grew up spending lots of free time at “the farm”. My uncle had purchased upwards of 80 acres of land outside of town. After he died in the Air Force the land went to my grandfather, and when he passed away my dad got the land and eventually built a house there.

My father passed away on August 16th, 2010 and my brother asked if I had any desire to move onto the land when our step-mother moved away. She will stay for a while, but eventually retire to the town further north where her family lives.

I thought about the 80-plus acres with a creek running through it.

I think our dreams have just begun to come to fruition.

Our plans are to have an essentially self-sufficient life on a small homeplace. We have planned out little bits and pieces of it over the years; we have lovingly come to call this place “Contentment” after Paul’s description in the Bible.

I plan to document and pass on the things that work and the things that don’t.

The journey will begin now for me and my wife Tiffany (in our 40’s), oldest son Nick at 16, Jewel at 5, and R.T. at 2 years of age.

The following months or years will be planning and preparing the land.

On some undetermined date in the future we will move to the homeplace and start our new life … one step at a time.

So, here we go … on the road to Contentment.

(By Wolf)

I’m not really a green kinda’ person (although, as Tiffany recently pointed out, we’re greener than we think)…

I just saw Colin Beavan’s web information on living green and saving the world. That’s not really me, but I do have a conservative side that wishes to live a simpler lifestyle. My family and I have spent hours thinking about our little community of people who want to live a simple, self sufficient life.

Of course, we would start our simple life in simple ways. We have already started in many areas like cloth diapers for the baby and making our own bread.

Our bigger steps are to grow some fruits and vegetables and maybe even get a cow for milk and butter. We began a year or so ago (early 2008) to save a little money and it was nice to save a few trees in the process. We cut down on our toilet paper usage and paper napkins. We started using cloth towels instead of paper towels for the little clean up jobs. We try not to use the electric dryer to dry all of our clothes and we cut out commercial television a long time ago for many reasons.

We’ve even moved on to food things. That started one day when we bought an ice cream maker. With the price of stuff going up and up it made more sense to make ice cream instead of buying it. Now we also make bread and are looking for other ways to make our own food items that are normally bought prepackaged. This move to making our own foods from scratch has been spurred along by the invasion of high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener in almost everything from soda to ketchup.

Then, in my dreams of the future, I have the even bigger step of starting a community of like-minded people who want to get rid of the “luxuries” of the fast paced life we have come way too close to being addicted to. I want some land with running water to build a mill and have a community that might look like it was from the turn of the century … the 20^th century. I say that it will need to be a community because I can’t do it all. We would need a blacksmith and a baker and a carpenter and a rancher and a farmer and the list goes on.

And the dream has a name.

We will live content in the community of Contentment.

My wife has covered this better than I can in her page about the reasons we chose this name. I’ll just say that it was a God thing. I look forward to getting closer and closer to this dream as time goes on. And anyone with a passion for a simpler life is welcome to join us in making this dream come true.